Then, in late March, came the handwritten note marked “Führer HQ,” passed from courier to courier, one hand to the next, from Maria back to the Krone hotel, until it ultimately reached Hans in the Kirchebners’ attic. Hans had already relayed some intriguing tidbits from Freddy to OSS in Bari, but nothing like this. He realized the significance of the message as soon as he began reading it. The length of the note alone—a weighty 146 words—was unusual: compared to the terse messages of a line or two that he had received before now from Freddy, this was a virtual War and Peace. Hans took out his OSS codebook and began translating Freddy’s words into a cipher, one letter at a time, using OSS’s elaborate five-digit system. He had to destroy each page of original coding after using it just once, then start with a fresh page of new codes from his pad book. It was a tedious, hours-long process, but he wanted to make sure to send the cable exactly as Freddy had written it; he couldn’t risk misconstruing information this important.
Once the encryption was complete, Hans began tapping out the transmission to Bari in Morse code. “Fuehrer HQ is 1½ km southeast of the Zossen Lager rail station,” he wrote. “Pay attention to group of 5 houses . . . Roofs very steep and camouflaged black, white, green.” The houses were built of “reinforced concrete; all walls one meter thick;” thirteen meters underground—beneath four separate levels of flooring that were each one meter thick—lay a whole additional complex of secret rooms, the cable said. “First house in southwest end is Adolf,” it continued. Two trains, each with twenty-four cars, were in constant service around the compound, with an “air warning tower in center of house group.”
Hans continued tapping away, almost done now. A recent Allied bombing raid in mid-March had hit an officers’ club near Hitler’s bunker, the cable continued; Hitler himself had watched the bombs hit. “Adolf tired of living—watched last attack from balcony. Alternate HQ at Ohrdruf . . .” Freddy’s dispatch closed by noting the source of the intelligence scoop, but not his drunkenness: “Austrian staff officer [who] left HQ March 21.”
The cable landed like a live grenade at OSS’s transmission center in Bari; it was almost as jolting as the one Hans had sent nineteen days earlier announcing that the Gulliver team was still alive. Freddy had given American intelligence a dramatic peek inside Hitler’s bunker, complete with precise locations and fortifications. Ulmer and his team in Bari pored over every word. This was “a ten-strike,” declared Ulmer, a bowling fan: a piece of raw intelligence so potentially important that he rushed it up the chain to intelligence officials outside the usual distribution group, across western Europe in London, Paris, and Florence, and to Washington. The subject line on the OSS memo detailing Freddy’s intelligence read simply “Hitler’s Headquarters.”
The detailed information gave Allied commanders the ability to fine-tune their targets during bombing runs over Berlin, although they still remained unable to penetrate the well-fortified bunker. Freddy was beginning to make a name for itself, albeit anonymously. Military intelligence officers, not just at OSS but in the army, the air force, and beyond, were learning that Bill Donovan’s cloak-and-dagger brigade, long derided as a minor-league outfit, had managed to plant an unnamed operative inside Tyrol who was generating valuable intelligence. The other branches wanted a piece of the operation as well, asking OSS what their Austrian operative could find out for them about imminent threats from the Nazis in Europe.
Leutnant Mayer had become a man in high demand.
Freddy “Fritz” Mayer in Freiburg, Germany, around age eleven, wearing his father’s World War I military belt.
Freddy and his family before leaving Germany in 1938. From left: his sister Ruth; his mother, Hilda; Freddy; his father, Heinrich; and his youngest sister, Ellen. His older brother, Julius, is not pictured.
Hans Wynberg (left) and twin brother Luke in a photo they sent back to their parents in the Netherlands, months after fleeing to the United States in May 1939.
William “Wild Bill” Donovan (above left), head of the Office of Strategic Services, inspects wartime training exercises at “Area F,” a converted country club in Bethesda, Maryland. Freddy (above right) at an OSS training facility in Europe.
Hans (left) and Freddy during OSS training in Italy.
The Amberger Hütte in the Austrian Alps, where Freddy Mayer, Hans Wynberg, and Franz Weber hid out after parachuting onto a glacier in February 1945.
The Nazi flag flies near the Church of Saint Margareta in the center of Oberperfuss, outside Innsbruck, Austria.
Nazi workers’ barracks atop an underground military airplane factory in Kematen, Austria, as seen today. Freddy Mayer posed as a French electrician at the factory.
Freddy in the Nazi uniform he wore in Innsbruck while posing as a wounded officer.
Franz Weber in his Wehrmacht officer’s uniform, before his defection in 1944.
Franz Hofer (right), the top Nazi official who served as the Gauleiter for Austria’s Tyrol region, shakes hands with Adolf Hitler in Berlin in 1940.
An excerpt from an American military report on the interrogation of Gestapo officer Walter Güttner, who admitted after his capture that he was involved in the beating of Freddy Mayer (misspelled “Maier”) in Innsbruck.
Franz Weber (left), Hans Wynberg (kneeling), and Freddy Mayer pose for a victory photo on May 8, 1945, a day after Germany’s surrender, in the Oberperfuss backyard of their Austrian accomplice Alois Abenthung.
“Mama Niederkircher” (above left) and Maria Hortnagl, two other key associates in Oberperfuss.
Occupying American soldiers from the 103rd Division in the Alps outside Innsbruck, shortly after the division took control of the Tyrol region.
Freddy Mayer with a display of some of his war medals at his home in West Virginia. He died two months later, in 2016, at the age of ninety-four.
9
* * *
The Birth of a Frenchman
INNSBRUCK, AUSTRIA
Early April 1945
From his barstool at the Nazi officers’ club, Freddy had proven he could pry loose even the most sensitive information from the Third Reich. American military officials were scrambling to put to use what they now knew of the Führer’s fortified underground bunker. But a string of other startling discoveries—including the one that Freddy would call “my biggest coup”—still lay ahead. And he would pull off most of them not in the crisply ironed uniform of a dead Nazi, but in the bedraggled garb of a French factory worker.
For three weeks in all, Leutnant Mayer wore the Nazi officer’s uniform as he recuperated from his “injuries” and culled bits of information from every corner of Innsbruck. His sheer confidence seemed to open doors for him. He walked the streets of the Tyrolean capital—from the officers’ barracks, to the military hospital, to the train station, and all points in between—as if he had lived there all his life. He watched and he listened. He would talk to anyone, but trusted almost no one. Out of uniform, late at night, he would sneak over to Gretl’s apartment on Anichstrasse, in the heart of Innsbruck, to exchange covert messages or, sometimes, meet another ally that Alois had found for him.
Tyrol was tilting toward chaos, even as Gauleiter Hofer and the Nazis were bringing in more troops and stockpiling more weapons to brace for a violent last stand against the Allies. In his travels under the guise of Leutnant Mayer, Freddy burrowed into the widening cracks in the Nazi machine, coming face-to-face with a motley cast of characters worthy of Gulliver himself: Nazi fanatics who pledged to fight the Reich’s enemies with their last breath; disaffected Wehrmacht soldiers who had grown tired of the cause; grifters and black-market scam artists devoid of ideology, who could be persuaded to work for either side if the deal was enticing enough. Freddy met with a one-eared ex-Nazi officer with the Schupo police force who was anxious to save himself if the Germans lost. He spoke with a grizzled Austrian con man who claimed to have hundreds of anti-Nazi resistance fighters at the ready, for the right price. He even heard talk of a notorious one-legged woma
n named Diane, who the Nazis suspected might be an American spy roaming the hinterlands. Every new contact he made offered the promise of information—and the threat of exposure. As an OSS official said with a sense of wonderment in one memo, “Each individual contacted could have turned Mayer over to the Gestapo had he been so inclined.”
Almost every day, Freddy put to paper the most useful information he had garnered and passed it on through his network of anonymous hands—on to Maria, he hoped, and on to Oberperfuss, then on to Hans, and then, if all went well, on to OSS in Italy. The radio cables were racing now. Only a few weeks earlier, as the three agents were struggling to make it down from the glacier, the haunting radio silence had led Bari to fear they were dead. Even when Hans had finally succeeded in sending his first cable, he had urged “patience” from OSS to give them time to get settled. Now, Freddy was determined to make up for the lag, firing off a blizzard of cables to the agency beginning in late March. Their network of cutouts had become so polished that Freddy could pass a message through to Hans and get it to Bari in a few hours. In just two frenzied weeks, Freddy and Hans relayed two dozen messages in all, reporting to OSS and the military on everything from troop movements to bomb-making factories and train schedules.
There was good news: an OSS agent code-named George Mitchell, thought to have been executed in Austria, was “alive and working” elsewhere in the country, Freddy wrote excitedly, and he was hopeful of making contact with the missing operative.
And bad news, too: The Nazis were “making grenades and small explosives” at a camouflaged underground facility, he relayed in another cable, and the Volkssturm, the militia-style group set up by Hitler as a last-stand “People’s Army,” was rebuilding a vacant school to serve as its new command base. Then there were the sightings of important figures, friend and foe, that Freddy passed on to Bari. Three French allies, including the sister of Resistance leader Charles de Gaulle, were imprisoned but safe at a VIP prison the Nazis set up at Schloss Itter, a castle east of Innsbruck, he reported in a discovery that elated the French. Meanwhile, the Italian dictator and Hitler ally Benito Mussolini was purportedly in hiding at a hotel seventy miles in the other direction, he wrote in a separate cable. And SS leader Heinrich Himm-ler himself had supposedly arrived with some of his Nazi aides just days before at a hotel outside Innsbruck, Freddy reported—in one of the few cables that turned out to be erroneous. Some of the notorious SS leader’s top staff had indeed traveled to Tyrol for a possible “last stand,” but Himmler himself had stayed behind with Hitler in Berlin.
Freddy was careful to describe the sources of his information in most of his cables: a “trusted worker” at a Nazi assembly plant, a carpenter, even a local teacher he had met. This was raw intelligence he was passing on, intriguing but unconfirmed, and he wanted officials in Bari to assess the reliability for themselves. On its own, OSS was able to confirm many of the leads that Freddy passed on, and the military’s official grading of his team’s usefulness quickly jumped from “untested”—the bottom rung—to “usually reliable,” near the top.
The adrenaline rush he felt from picking up a useful nugget of information kept Freddy going at a frenetic pace into the early hours of the mornings. The hunt became a thrilling game: outwitting the Nazis, chasing military information, passing it on to Hans. The bombs dropping regularly from Allied airplanes above Innsbruck were a loud reminder of the game’s mortal consequences, but they were little deterrent to Freddy. When the Nazis’ air-raid sirens went off in Innsbruck, signaling another incoming strike, Freddy would simply head for a bunker or a safe space with everyone else. He never really worried—except for the time that he bicycled outside the city for an arranged meeting with a small group of supposed resisters-in-waiting. The resisters were all no-shows. Heading back to Innsbruck, Freddy missed the air-raid warnings and was practically thrown off his bike by a thunderous incendiary bomb that detonated behind him, shaking the ground under his wheels. The force at his back was so great, it sent Freddy hurtling down the path, clinging furiously to the handlebars.
After that scare, Freddy and Hans contacted Bari with a personal plea: For the safety of their own man in Tyrol, could the air force give him a heads-up in the future as to where and when they would be dropping their bombs? OSS dutifully forwarded the request and sent back a terse response:
AIR FORCE WILL NOT GIVE ADVANCE INFO ON BOMBINGS. HEADQUARTERS DIRECTS YOU TO USE CUTOUTS AND STAY OUT OF TOWN.
Hans was relaying more cables than ever to Italy, but he remained restless up in the Kirchebners’ attic, with hours of downtime still left to fill. Between cables, he played chess against himself on his newly carved board, and Frannie still came upstairs for the occasional game of Mühle. Looking for new diversions, he tried to pick up the spotty radio signals bouncing around the Alps from the BBC or American Forces Network. With the volume turned down to a whisper to avoid notice, Hans would listen for the jazz notes of the American bandleader Ray McKinley, his favorite, and he became enamored of the popular tune “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” It appealed to his optimistic side. Except for a few terrifying moments sledding down the Alps with Franz, he had always convinced himself that things would turn out all right for him—in an attic hideaway in Austria now surrounded by Gestapo; in his sudden relocation to Brooklyn six years earlier; even in the unknown plight of his parents and his little brother in the Netherlands. The song’s refrain, and its message of putting aside your fears, resonated: Life can be so sweet / On the sunny side of the street.
What was there to be afraid of, anyway? Hans told himself that he wasn’t really in harm’s way there in his attic: that he was only playing a passive role in the war, and that what he was doing took no real courage—not like Freddy, out roaming among the Nazis; or his twin brother, sent to Normandy with the US army. Sitting alone in an attic did not constitute, in his mind, what he had always thought of as “the realities of a world war.” He could almost hear his father, wherever he was, telling him the story about the heroic Dutch naval commander who blew up his own ship rather than let the foreign marauders aboard. I’d rather light the fuse in the dynamite! Yet there was Hans hiding out in an attic, tapping out codes on a radio transmitter and playing board games with an Austrian teenager. What real courage did that take?
He wanted to do more. In late March, soon after he had sent out Freddy’s bombshell dispatch on the Führer’s bunker, Hans seized on an idea: he would start an underground newspaper. Goebbels and the Nazis had mastered the art of propaganda to devastating effect, spewing vile messages on radio and in print about the evils of Jews and the Reich’s other “enemies.” Hans wanted to counter the Nazis’ lies—by letting people in Tyrol know the truth about what was actually happening in the war. He even had a name in mind for his paper: Freies Österreich—Free Austria. His radio brought him a wave of news in those first days and weeks of April, much of it foretelling advances for the Allies, but he had no way to get it out. So he passed word downstairs to the Kirchebners, requesting supplies for a new project. A typewriter and a small stack of carbon paper soon appeared in the attic. Who brought them, how they were acquired—Hans never knew. He didn’t care. He just started typing, with one ear to the radio receiver. The news alerts would come in from the BBC about the latest shocking Nazi atrocity discovered by the Allies, or the latest troop surge, and Hans, who had always dabbled in writing, would translate it into German and turn it into news stories: Eastern Front Collapsing . . . Vienna Liberated from the Nazis . . . Roosevelt Dies; Truman Is President . . . Soviets Launch Offensive on Berlin. For some editions, he would draw a makeshift map of Europe showing the advance of Allied troops, along with a section he wrote called “Do You Know?”—with facts about what life in America was really like.
He would deliver his fledgling newspaper downstairs—a few dozen sheets off the carbon paper at a time—and Alois and his cohorts would distribute the copies, as discreetly as they could, to sympathizers throughout the valley. It was a s
mall-time operation, reaching perhaps a hundred or so people that April. OSS had never envisioned its radio operator in the Alps taking on the role of a modern-day Thomas Paine, but Hans’s bosses in Bari were thrilled when they learned how he had been using his spare time. “His little paper,” OSS reported, “made a terrific impression on the people who were very eager to learn more about America and to understand the nature of Nazism.”
Freddy, meanwhile, was now generating intelligence leads from all parts of Nazi-controlled Tyrol, but the one target that became a near-obsession for him was the Nazis’ massive railway system. The mechanic in Freddy had always gravitated to engines and locomotives, and he knew how badly OSS wanted intelligence that would allow them to cut off the Brenner Pass—the Nazis’ gateway between southern Austria and northern Italy in one of their last remaining strongholds in all of Europe.
It was Franz’s youngest sister, Eva, who first helped Freddy maneuver his way inside the railway system. Only twenty-one years old, Eva was a petite woman with an unassuming manner who faded into the Nazi bureaucracy in her government job filing paperwork in Innsbruck. Freddy soon discovered that beneath her guileless facade was a determined woman passionately opposed to the Nazis—and she knew other people in the city’s underbelly who might help him. She had already steered Freddy to the woman who supplied him with his vital Nazi identification. Just a few weeks later she set up another meeting to introduce Freddy to a gritty black-market operator named Leo, who made a living by paying off railway workers to move his underground wares. Leo told Freddy he could get him information on the Nazi trains: where they were running, what they carried, who was working on them. Leo had no obvious political loyalties, except to the gold marks in Freddy’s pocket. He showed little concern over what Eva’s new friend planned to do with the information, or even which side he was on. For $10 or $20 per transaction, Leo was willing to pass on whatever information Freddy wanted. The two men soon had an arrangement, and $150 later, OSS had a whole new stream of intelligence reports coming in from Leo’s underground network on the Nazi rail system.
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